I Wouldn’t Mind Being a Dad

Motherhood involves a level of physical sacrifice and life restructuring I’m not sure I fancy, and I remain deeply unimpressed that this is the only model of parenthood available to me.

Photo by The Cleveland Museum of Art on Unsplash

Omg guys, did you know that if you go around saying things like, as a woman, you don’t want kids but you wouldn’t mind being a dad, you’re an abomination to society and personally responsible for the collapse of civilisation?

I know right, how mad is that?

Apparently, this opinion makes me an enemy of progress, family values, national stability, and the general continuation of the human race. Historians will one day look back and say yes, everything was ticking along nicely until Kelly Courtez went, “I wouldn’t mind being a dad though.” Burn her at the stake.

I’ve tried explaining this in a calm, rational manner, because what I’m saying is not complicated: I wouldn’t mind being a dad. Not a mum. A dad to lil Teddy who exists as part of my life instead of replacing it like a biological hostile takeover.

Every time this comes up, even hypothetically, people react like you’ve just admitted to pushing pensioners into traffic just because, and they go, Oh no, she’s one of those women who has noticed the terms and conditions.

Because the moment you say you’d be open to parenthood under different biological circumstances, it stops sounding like a personal preference and starts sounding like a challenge to the narrative that motherhood is a universally fulfilling upgrade available to all women at any time, provided they stop being dramatic and get on with it.

If I were a dad, I could have lil Teddy and still largely continue being myself.

I’d flirt with Sharon from HR and call looking after him “babysitting” like I’m doing a charity shift for UNICEF. If I get overwhelmed, I’d go for a drive, maybe a cheeseburger, then come back and get on with things.

The version of parenthood available to me comes with a slightly different brochure, which reads something like:

Congratulations, your entire physical form will now be requisitioned by nature like a council building during wartime. Organs squashed and rearranged, bones going all geological event on your arse. Nutrients redirected like “Sorry mate, lil Teddy needs it more.” Hormones flooding the system until you’re crying because a dog exists, while everyone insists this is a beautiful journey.

Afterwards, you’re expected to bounce back emotionally, professionally, physically, sexually,and socially as if nothing happened, except now you’re also responsible for a fragile life form society, and adult Teddy (thanks to his therapist), will blame you for ruining no matter what you do.

And I’m supposed to look at this and go, Omg, amazing, can’t wait.

Fatherhood, from the outside, feels like an addition that slots into an existing life rather than swallowing it. Plenty of dads are fully in it—present, knackered, doing the work—but the version on offer still lands very differently.

And I’m here like, I’d love the option of having lil Teddy without being structurally required to dissolve as a human being in order to do it. Because it’s not lil Teddy who gets to me. I can imagine loving him easily.

Also yeah, cue the world’s smallest violin. Boo fucking hoo. Woman doesn’t want kids because it’s hard. Someone alert the authorities.

Yes, mate.
That’s the point.

It’s not “hard” like doing your tax return for the first time ever, or going for a hike with a stinking hangover, it’s life-restructuring, body-altering, identity-dismantling hard, rewriting your entire existence and then expecting you to smile about it in matching pyjamas for Instagram and caption it #blessed.

The second you go, hang on, this looks like an enormous personal cost, and I’m not entirely sure I want to pay it, you become defective—no longer useful to society, whatever the fuck that means. Clock’s ticking, girls. You’ll regret it. Who’ll look after you when you’re old? What if you meet the right person? What if you change your mind?

Ah yes, the retirement strategy of procreating in the hope they’ll one day manage your medication and not resent you too much.

Some women genuinely want that life and thrive in it. They find meaning and joy and chaos in a good way that feels expansive rather than diminishing. Love that for them. I just keep thinking that if something is so natural and fulfilling, it shouldn’t need so much marketing and emotional blackmail to get me to sign up.

And what really pisses me off is I can say all this, understand it intellectually, and then out of nowhere a voice pops up in the back of my head going: Well it is the woman’s job though. This dusty caveman voice communicates via grunts and deeply ingrained cultural programming—You carry baby. Man hunt mammoth.

Well done women of the past! You kept civilisation running long enough for us to crawl out of caves and invent central heating and antidepressants.

Only somewhere along the way, biological capacity hardened into moral expectation, and ability became obligation. Now we’re stuck in this half-modern, half-prehistoric system where women technically have choices, but the ancient software still runs in the background, saying things like,

Someone has to do it.
It’s the woman’s job.
Stop being dramatic.
Millions of women have done this before you.

Let me tell you something—millions of people have also worked night shifts under strip lighting for decades, and we’re not framing that as a sacred calling.

Once something has existed for long enough, it starts to feel natural.

The other day in the supermarket, there was a couple with their version of lil Teddy in aisle 9. She had the kid on her hip, grabbing items and loading the trolley one-handed. He stood behind it, drumming on the handle to whatever was playing in his headphones, and fuck me if i didnt want to cry for her. I didn’t think he was a terrible father or that she was miserable. I just thought that the distribution of effort looked so familiar—we have entire social structures built around maternal sacrifice—and the brain goes, well obviously this is just what women do.

That’s the unsettling part. The overall setup still feels like a gamble I’m not entirely sure I want to take because once you’re in, that’s it.

We built society around producing lil Teddys because without them, we’d have died out in about five minutes.

Fair enough. But somewhere down the road, the ability to have children turned into a full do-or-be-damned expectation. Woman equals mother-in-waiting. Her body reads as future resource whether she consents to the role or not.

Reliable contraception, women earning their own money, actual legal autonomy—all of this is embarrassingly recent. Choice hasn’t exactly had centuries to bed in. The idea that a woman can simply decide not to reproduce without it being a tragedy, a failure, or a philosophical crisis for the species is still settling into the collective psyche.

Plenty of people throughout history have drifted in and out of parenthood. Died in wars. Disappeared into monasteries. Gone out for cigarettes and never returned. Vanished into other lives entirely. No one frames that as a betrayal of their biological purpose.

The minute women exercise the same level of choice, it becomes a civilisation-level concern that requires a think piece about the future of humanity.

So every now and again, I have to manually uninstall the caveman software and remind myself that civilisation will not collapse if I personally decline to supply it with another citizen.

Do some people think stepping outside the expected path is selfish, unnatural, or a waste of functional reproductive equipment? Yes, they do. But some people are very invested in lives that aren’t theirs, and we don’t treat that as a public emergency.

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Basically, I wouldn’t mind being a dad.

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